1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure generally relates to the field of information retrieval, in particular to relationship-based information retrieval and presentation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many applications have been developed to provide keyword-based information searches. Although effective to locate documents including the keywords, keyword-based searches require that the searcher use the right keywords in order to retrieve the desired information and are likely to return too much information. In contrast, a human brain often retrieves information following a train of thought. For example, a person trying to remember the name of another person that attended a lunch meeting might remember the name of the restaurant where the meeting took place. Because the desired information (e.g., the other person's name) typically do not share keywords with the known information (e.g., the name of the restaurant), keyword-based searches cannot locate the desired information in such scenarios.
Information that a user can easily relate to typically is more helpful to the user compared to information the user cannot relate to. Applications providing keyword-based searches often provide users with only a list of matching documents, sometimes along with a small piece of content including the keywords (snippets), without identifying relationships between the returned documents and the users. Therefore, there is a need for a way to conduct searches based on relationships and to display search results in a manner that exposes the relationship between the search results and the users.